Compartmentalisation
Neurotic-level defence; secondary in McWilliams' scheme, close kin to isolation and dissociation. Contradictory values, behaviours or parts of life are kept in separate mental boxes so they never meet.
What drives it
Lets a person live with contradictions (the devout executive who signs off on fraud, the family man with a double life) without guilt or the anxiety of choosing.
How it shows
Work
Speaks sincerely about integrity on Monday and backdates contracts on Tuesday, with no felt tension because the two never appear in the same frame. Different positions in different meetings that would clash if anyone compared notes. When both are put in front of them, blankness or annoyance rather than guilt.
Relationships
Friend groups that must never meet; an affair kept sealed off; the loving parent who is a bully at work. Partners who discover the other box often say “I didn't know who he was.”
Self
You'd be uncomfortable if people from two parts of your life compared notes. You feel no tension between belief and act until someone puts them side by side.
What tells it apart
Splitting: Splitting divides other people into all good and all bad; compartmentalisation divides the person's own conduct and values, and they can still see others as mixed.
Moral disengagement: Moral disengagement actively justifies bad conduct; compartmentalisation offers no justification and simply never lets the conduct and the values be considered together.
Suppression: Leaving work at the office is chosen and reversible; defensive compartmentalisation hides a contradiction the person would be distressed to face.
A test
Put the two contradictory facts into one sentence; compartmentalisation shows as blankness, annoyance or a quick change of subject, rather than a reasoned defence or guilt.
Questions to carry
- When the two contradictory facts are put into one sentence, what happens on their face?
- Which two parts of my life would feel uncomfortable meeting each other?
How strong the research is
clinical. Clinically described; social-psychology research on moral inconsistency and self-concept compartmentalisation touches it but uses different definitions.
Where it comes from
Psychoanalytic usage; described as a secondary defence by Nancy McWilliams, 1994
Sources
- Richard C. Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy (1995)